See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

sighing and moaning, filled with life and motion. Wandering Jews who never stirred. We all smiled, but we didn’t know why.

“Perhaps you wonder,” said Anshel Wasserman at last, “why I am so generously allowing you to mix your own creations into my story? Et! What care I, so long as they arr warriors, girded with bravery? You understand that this is not the first time I have spoken about the story. It is possible that even before I told it to Neigel I roamed the world telling it, and that it has given rise by now to a thousand other stories—yours will be the thousand and first—and everyone who ever heard it wished to bring his favorite into the picture, and let me tell you a little secret, even Neigel, when his time came, made a contribution to my story … Everyone brought only what he was, a shred of his own life, of his dear ones, his forgotten ones … No, Shleimeleh, no matter how many people you bring me, there will always be room for more, only the story itself is always hidden from me, and I have to approach it with my inadequate powers, and in this there is no one to help me, and you know that I, nebuch, was always a coward, and even now I shudder as I transform our friends, with a stroke of my pen, from tailor’s dummies to flesh-and-blood heroes, and I know if Zalmanson were here, he would twist his mouth in mockery and say, ‘The trouble with you, my little Wasserman’—this is how he used to open all his sermons to me, and someday I should sit down and try to discover where he found those flaws—‘is that you are a coward! A coward in life and a coward on paper! Do you perhaps recall how many quarrels we had before I could convince you to leave your boring job in the archives and start writing in earnest? And later, when things turned out well, the trouble I took to persuade you to write a real series?! And how many nights I sat up with you urging you to dare to write children’s stories unlike any written by your Hebrew predecessors? You could have taken their straight paved roads and written as they did about young Abraham smashing the idols, and King Solomon, the boy who refused to eat his porridge, until Joab the army chief hid under the table and frightened him with a terrible scream. No! We had enough of those! ‘Love of Zion’ and ‘Youthful Instruction,’ and I knew, my little Wasserman, that you would write the way an enlightened writershould. As their writers do! Yes yes (so Zalmanson said to me, would that he were here now), I was not frightened by the accusation I knew they would level at us, and I thought it fitting that at last a Jewish writer would write beautiful adventure tales, thrilling and exciting stories full of love for all mankind, not just the Jews! Nu, Shleimeleh, he so provoked me that I sat down to write my ‘Children of the Heart,’ and the jealous critics attacked the stories as though they had come upon much booty, and they dipped their pens in gall and slandered me, and complained about my meager talents, and also about my wicked scheme to corrupt the youth of Israel, and they were not content till they had conjured up the amiable Abraham-Mordechai Piurco, one who had written a book called Faithful Shoots twenty years before, and had dared collect and copy into the language of the past simple tales of goodness, loyalty, and courage, these not only from our brethren but from the Gentiles as well! And when he wanted to describe a man of character, he did not refer to Father Abraham again but, rather, may I not be mistaken, to an English sea captain named Richardson! Ai, Shleimeleh, these critics became so loathsome to me that if not for Zalmanson, whose hand never stirred from mine, I should not have written the little I wrote. Yet though I wrote, I knew I grieved him by failing to realize his hopes. And in my twenty years of writing ‘The Children of the Heart’ we argued over every letter and apostrophe, and he would attack my manuscript, brandishing his pen to correct and delete in a fury with a band of bad angels, screaming, ‘Murderer! Thief! Plagiarist! Such talent is not lost, it is betrayed! Your talent has been left in the lurch, Wasserman! And would that you were a better thief, so the moist prints you leave in fear and perspiration would remain undetected! But all the characters are made in your own image: and even when you send them off to the most enchanted places, they remain cautious little Wassermans winding their way through your tedious sentences! You write like a Galizianer! Too long-winded! The devil only knows why I go on publishing you, and only he could understand why children are so enamored of your haggard prose! Ach, Wasserman, a little more courage! And a little more humor, too, you’re not so dry in real life, you know, and you always raise a smile, however unintentionally, so why be stingy with the spice of irony? Nu, be a clown, my Wasserman, be a wedding entertainer, and something of a liar and an adulterer of words, and write with love, and most of all with madness,otherwise everything is so boring, so flat, so soulless and Godless. Nu, Wasserman, what do you say?’”

[ 3 ]

BUT SEVERAL DAYS HAVE TO ELAPSE before the story can be told. First of all, Neigel has other things on his agenda besides listening to a fairy tale about the elderly Children of the Heart. It’s true, sometimes in the middle of an important meeting, or when he goes out to supervise the transports arriving on the train, he feels briefly tempted to savor an errant bubble